The Effects of Multimedia on Academic Performance

Dr. Shostya and I are very proud to announce that our research entitled “The effect of video games and other media usage on college students’ studying habits and academic performance” was accept to the Eastern Economic Association Conference for March 2014! When we received the news, we were thrilled. It is a difficult application process that we were working on since the beginning of the year. We received an email which stated that our abstract for our research was reviewed among a council who agreed that our research would fit well into one of the categories for presentation at the conference. This was great news that I got to share with Dr. Shostya, just as excited as I was. We felt like our research was really coming together quite well and now the Eastern Economic Association (EEA) supported our work giving us the confidence in our research. Although we still have much more work to do for our research we will be working on it painstakingly until the conference comes up in March. We will work as hard as we can so that we can present a solid case. Although I am a little apprehensive to present our research to a room full of professional economists with several years of experience with research, I know that Dr. Shostya will help me to prepare to the best of my abilities so that I can impress the audience. I think traveling to Boston to present the research will be a great opportunity and a wonderful experience for me to learn first hand about the world of research that goes on. It will be very interesting to sit and listen to others present their research as well in order to learn what other topics are being research in the field of economics today.

Before the winter break, Dr. Shostya and I were beginning to run correlations on all of the data we had collected for our research. It was proving to be a very rewarding experience because I could finally begin to see how the data was coming together and how we were forming results with the research we had collected to support our data. Although not all of the correlations that we were running were conclusive, we were still able to get a handle of the results. However, Dr. Shostya suggested that after our results were all tabulated using correlations, we should use a regression analysis to further support our results. Regression analysis would give us a better and more sophisticated way to present our results, providing us with more details about why and how the variables relate to each other. Over the winter break I was able to carve out some time to review the program Stata, which is used for regression analysis among many researchers. I was able to practice with the program in order to get a handle on how it worked. Then when the Spring semester started I was able to work with Dr. Shostya and her colleague Professor Colman, who is an expert with the statistical program Stata, on the regressions for our research and come up with solid results. These regressions will provide more information on the causal relationship between the dependent and independent variables in the model and will allow us to test our hypotheses and statistically.

I look forward to finishing all the results and preparing for the Eastern Economic Association Conference in Boston come this March. It will be a lot of work to fit into an already busy schedule, but I can appreciate the challenge.